An Ancient Fear Still Defines Whiteness

The Fear's Historical Origins

Our culture gives us an image of Europeans as more rational, calm, and
knowledgeable than the rest of the world. Yet a reasonable case can be
made that Europeans were, are, and have been for most of the past six centuries,
as a group more frightened than most of the rest of the people in the world.

In the days of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Europeans
perceived -- correctly -- that they were surrounded and outnumbered by
people of cultures that did not agree with them and might well assimilate
them out of existence. Those Europeans who were educated in history were
aware that they lived on a peninsula over which armies
had swept many times from out of Central Asia. They were aware that the much more successful
civilization from which many of their languages, their civic organization,
and their religion, came from, the Roman Empire, had been overthrown by
barbarians from outside its gates

.

Europe is a small peninsula connected to Asia, and not far, as the horde
rides, from the turbulent area of desert and plain from which many of the
Old World's conquerors, whether Dorians or Aryans or Mongols or Tartars
or Turks, have come. Several times these conquerors came close to overrunning
Europe. Several other times, they did overrun it, or at least major parts
of it.

Certainly they surrounded it. The German anthropologist Julius Lips,
in his book The Savage Hits Back, refers to the age of discovery as "but
the bursting of the chain which the colored world had put round the white".

1492 -- Discovery or Escape?

The main adversary of Europe in Columbus' day was the world of Islam, which
was larger, and until the 17th or 18th century was more dynamic and technologically
sophisticated. In the century before the "Age of Discovery", Europeans
also suffered "the crisis of feudalism", characterized by starvation, plagues,
and peasant rebellions. Just as the world depression of capitalism in the
1930s was only ended by world war, this crisis was only ended by, in the
words of historical anthropologist Eric Wolf, "locating, seizing, and distributing
resources available beyond the European frontiers" -- in other words, the
riches and labor of Africa and America.

In Fulcrums of Change: Origins of Racism in the Americas and other
Essays, Jan Carew is one writer who notes that the fall of Granada,
the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, happened in 1492. In other worlds, Columbus
sailed from a war zone. It was far from clear that the Muslim armies would
not in fact return and re-conquer Spain. Columbus, and Vasco de Gama, and
the other explorers of his day, were not disinterestedly seeking discovery.
They were on
a mission to outflank their greatest economic, intellectual, and military
rivals.

When the Christian monarchy of Castile, after seven centuries of African
rule in Spain, overthrew the Islamic kingdom of Granada, it also expelled
the Jews who had also been part of the Iberian culture for centuries, and
sent out Columbus looking for a route around or behind the powers of Africa
and Islam. His voyages were not a sign of an adventurous people, of a prosperous
Europe setting out to explore the world. They were the actions of régimes
that still felt themselves on the defensive. And what they were defending
themselves against was, above all, Islamic Africa.

Islamic Africa was not only the military but the economic power of the
day. Gold from the Mali Empire was the source of the first gold coins in
Europe after the Roman Empire. When Mansa Musa, King of the Mali Empire,
made his extraordinary pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, giving away and spending
a vast fortune, gold was devalued throughout the Mediterranean world for
as much as twelve years. (That event was as close in time to Columbus'
first American trip as the end of slavery in the British Empire is to us.)
One is reminded of the impact of Saudi Arabian princes and businessmen
at the height of the "energy crisis". The difference is that African gold
was the main source of this form of wealth for Asians and Europeans for
centuries. It was only when Europeans simultaneously outflanked Islamic
Africa by going farther south along the African coast, and also reached
sources of gold in America, that this economic power was superseded.

When Carew writes about 1492, he emphasizes not just the fall of Granada,
but the burning of manuscripts and records in Granada by the conquering
Spanish. Thus, he notes, the event was not only "the end of seven hundred
years of African power and influence in Europe which, at its zenith, extended
from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Rhone valley of France." It
was also the beginning of whitewashing of what Carew calls "Africa's civilizing
mission in Europe". Part of this whitewashing involved re-casting the Moors
that ruled Spain as "a 'race' of hybrid 'semites'", though their African
roots were clear.

African Contact

Is Carew's "civilizing mission" a reasonable idea? Granada and the other
Muslim kingdoms in Spain did reflect a moment of high culture and of tolerance
for Spain, far different from the Inquisition and the empire-building that
followed, let alone the years of economic decline that followed that era.
Ronald Sanders, writing of the same period in Lost Tribes and Promised
Lands: The Origins of American Racism, writes of moments when it seemed
possible that Spain would "produce an unprecedented Latin-Arabic synthesis,
a rich and unique Andalusian civilization." This would have been a very
different kind of contact between Europe and Africa than the one we have
grown used to, and one far more beneficial for both.

And yet it may be, as African culture overcomes centuries of suppression,
both in Africa and in the Americas, that we will still see that synthesis
in another form. Opening ourselves to it, however, especially for those
who perceive themselves as white, requires that we face and overcome an
ancient fear -- a fear that we have carried with us across the planet.
We have been afraid of being overwhelmed, by plague, by alien cultures,
by the Other. In the process of defending ourselves, we have left behind
or utterly changed everything we were defending. We have lost our ancient
faiths and customs, our ancentral communities, our connection to the land
and the seasons, our
families that extended in time and space.

And we certainly have not succeeded in circumventing Africa. From the
the imitation of African music that is our music, whether we call it Dixieland
or country or rock, to the appropriation of African language and food,
US culture is in fact profoundly African. It is vividly clear in such illuminating
moments as the gathering of the Promise Keepers -- when hundreds of thousands
of "white" men gathered on the Mall, most of them not even allowing themselves
to realize that they were imitating African-American men who gathered there
two years earlier at the Million Man March, as they prayed with African
gestures in the shadow of African-style monuments that they thought of as Greek. And, as with any gathering of "white" people, perhaps one in three in the crowd had African ancestors and didn't even know it themselves.

As white people, we are not defending our cultural heritage, because
we have almost no connection to the cultural heritage we left behind. For
better or worse, we have made ourselves into people that would be totally
unrecognizable to our ancestors in 1492.We are not defending ourselves
against taking on aspects of other cultures. In fact we revel in doing
so. Most of our wealth, in ideas as well as in resources, has come
from what we have taken from other cultures, especially the ones that were
here before it was America, and those of Africa. Even what we think of as our European heritage, such as Greek philosophy, was mostly filtered through to us by Muslims, and was developed by people who thought of themselves as Mediterranean and who looked to Africans as their teachers.

All we are defending is our fear. That is all that whiteness
is. Fear, and the privilege of sharing in the loot that fear has accumulated
over the centuries. Fear, and all the ways that living in fear has distinguished
us from the rest of humanity over five centuries.

Fear has no end but courage. Fear is quite capable of
devouring the planet, of ending humanity itself. Which is logical, because
ultimately that is what we fear. Humanity. Ourselves, with a darker face
and a different way of praying. It is time to give up our fear, our inaccurate distinctions,
our privileges, our fatal journey, and turn to the real exploration of
creating a just and whole world with the others who also live in it.